The Mire: Tangents, threads and opinions from The Wire
HQ

21|09|2012

Flying Lotus stares moodily from the cover of The
Wire's October issue, his third eye caught in a blur as it
materialises in the region of his right temple. A neat/corny camera
trick by photographer Jake Walters, you might think. But either way
it feels like an appropriate representation – after all, FlyLo is a
producer-DJ whose ancestors were cosmic visionaries.

As interviewer Britt Brown points out, but as all you Generation
Bass cadets will already know full well, FlyLo's great aunt was
Alice Coltrane, that divine messenger who appeared to us in the
guise of a jazz musician – although Britt doesn't go on to state
the next obvious but still rather mindnumbing fact that this meant
his great uncle would have been John Coltrane himself, had he lived
long enough to anoint baby Steven Ellison's head once he'd come
into the world in October 1983.

Another of FlyLo's great uncles (a blood relative rather than
in-law – he was Alice's half-brother) was the somewhat lesser known
Ernie Farrow, a double bassist who was another family fixture on
Detroit’s vibrant post-war jazz scene. He might not be up there in
the pantheon of black music mystics alongside John and Alice, but
in the late 50s Ernie was a core member of the group led by Yusef
Lateef, who definitely is. Lateef was one of the first jazz
musicians to reject his given identity (William Emanuel Hudddleston
– a slave name if ever there was one) and convert to Islam. A
multi-instrumentalist who introduced strange new instruments and
scales to hard bop, he was a significant influence on John and
Alice's emerging concept of Universal Consciousness. Great Uncle
Ernie's basslines and rebab playing were core components of
Lateef's late 50s/early 60s jazz-exotica albums such as Before
Dawn, Jazz And The Sounds Of Nature, Prayer To
The East and Eastern Sounds. These were records which
mixed modal jazz and Hollywood kitsch with pan-Africanisms and
proto-New Age spirituality in a way that ensured they would become
foundation stones of the fusion aesthetic that would underpin much
of the advanced black music to emerge in the subsequent two decades
– which is to say the traditon which lends FlyLo's Web 2.0
cosmogrammatic beat science the kind of historical weight that is
both real and deep but also mediated and synthetic, predicated on a
very conscious process of fabrication.

FlyLo is an industry player too, of course – recording for Warp,
pulling down all those headliner DJ slots, mentoring the next
generation of downtempo beatnutz via his Brainfeeder label. And as
Britt also points out, he has some family precedents for these
rather more pragmatic aspects of his operation too.

Even closer on the bloodline than Alice or Ernie is their
half-sister Marilyn McLeod, aka FlyLo's granny, who in the 1970s
was a songwriter for Tamla Motown. And if Marilyn wasn't exactly a
one-woman Holland-Dozier-Holland, a handful of her songs found
their way into the repertoires of some of the label’s headline
acts, as both they and Motown attempted to adjust to the seismic
changes in black R&B precipitated by the rise of disco.

(There's a nice family photo on the site of photographer
Theo Jemison which has
FlyLo holding up a copy of Great Aunty Alice's A Monastic
Trio LP, while behind him granny sits playing an upright
piano).

In his article, Britt singles out Marilyn's big moment, Diana
Ross's recording of "Love Hangover", which was co-written in 1976
by Marilyn and regular collaborator Pam Sawyer. This was the track
that reignited the solo career of Motown's hottest property by
propelling her into the realm of the glitter ball (literally
almost, as during the recording sessions producer Hal Davis rigged
the studio with a glitter ball substitute in the form of a strobe
light to get Ross the Boss, initially something of a reluctant
disco diva, into the appropriate mood of hedonistic abandon).
Despite being issued six years into the disco decade, by which time
the music had established an irresistible style and momentum that
was all its own, "Love Hangover" is one of those cuts whose
structure carries a trace-echo of disco's debt to Bronx salsa:
watch out for the vertiginous moment around 2:50 minutes in when
dreamy bliss turns to urgent desire as the sickly-sweet sentiments
and structure of the song suddenly shift into a mantric bass-drums
coda that builds and builds but never peaks.

Four years before "Love Hangover" yoked itself to the disco
juggernaut to hit serious paydirt, Marilyn co-wrote "Walk In The
Night" for veteran R&B saxophonist Jnr Walker. This was a
proto-disco-cum-Easy Listening instrumental phantasia that predated
by a year the records most commonly cited as the ones that ushered
in disco as a musical genre in its own right, namely The
Temptations' "Law Of The Land" and Eddie Kendricks's "Girl You Need
A Change Of Mind" (both also issued by Motown). As well as having a
melody that was somehow both ethereal and indelible (a classic Easy
Listening strategy), "Walk In The Night" had the kind of propulsive
mid-tempo backbeat that would ensure it would become a Northern
Soul staple.

The same year she wrote "Walk In The Night", another of
Marilyn's compositions (this one co-written with Berry Gordy Jr
himself no less) was given to Marvin Gaye, who recorded it in the
fraught interregnum between the post-civil rights laments of
What's Going On and the carnal entreaties of its eventual
follow up Let's Get It On. "The World Is Rated X" was
originally slated for inclusion on the abandoned You're The
Man album and has had something of a peripatetic existence
ever since (it was included on the Got To Give It Up
anthology and the expanded edition of Let's Get it On). So
it's one of the lesser known tracks from the most feted period of
one of the most conflicted artists of all. But it's an amazing
performance by the singer, in terms of the timing and the flow, and
the way he invests the rather parochial protest lyric with urgent
beseeching drama. As the track progresses the arrangement thickens
to add the kind of epic backdrop of strings and horns that would
become a disco archetype. You can still hear it all percolating
away beneath the rebarbative drum programming and EQing on this
typical mid-80s remix (the original is nowhere to be found on
YouTube's increasingly compromised archive).

In 1979, Marylin finally got to record and sing one of her own
songs, though not for Motown. "(I Don't Wanna Dance Tonight) I Got
Love On My Mind" was originally released as a Fantasy 12". The A
side was reissued earlier this year on the American Hot
volume of the Disco Discharge series. But whatever her
talents, Marilyn was no Loleatta Holloway, and it's the
instrumental B side that you need, a 144 bpm disco flyer in the
style of Azymuth’s "Jazz Carnival". The track has never been
reissued, and its 'record spinning on a turntable' YouTube post has
been wiped from the archive by the copyright lawyers (although you
can hear it here courtesy of
the Disco
Delivery blog). Which is a double disservice, because while
such posts are vilified by the record industry as pure piracy,
their comments pages can serve as channels for the dissemination of
some illuminating local history.

As an example, on that now deleted YouTube post someone called
Charles had commented: "I had the pleasure of working with
[Marilyn] on my group's first album Rare Gems Odyssey."
This turns out to be Charles E Givings, an LA session drummer who,
in the mid-70s, worked regularly with Marilyn when she was demoing
her songs for Motown (the organisation relocated from Detroit to LA
in the early 70s taking Marilyn with it – which I guess might be
the reason FlyLo grew up in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley
rather than inner city Detroit: what would his tracks have sounded
like if Motown and granny had stayed put, I wonder?). The record
Charles is referring to is the 1977 debut by his fabulously obscure
Cali-funk troupe Rare Gems Odyssey. The album, which contained a
number of Marilyn McLeod writing credits, disappeared without trace
(although it seems the group is still a going concern). But a
decade after its release, two of its tracks had a brief second life
in the UK's Rare Groove underground, one of the incubator club
scenes for the generation of Brit-hop producers and label runners
who would emerge in the 90s to help define the jazzy downtempo
loops 'n' beats aesthetic that would become one of the
(unacknowledged) templates for FlyLo's jazzy downtempo
hiphop-electronica fusions (if FlyLo doesn't owe props to Mo'Wax,
then my name's James Lavelle).

Fast forward two decades to 1998, when time folded in on itself,
and Marilyn and Pam Sawyer got paid twice over, by writing the
cookie cutter R&B of Monica's "The First Night", which pivoted
on a sample of "Long Hangover" (cute).

"The First Night" is one of those tracks which
became a YouTube meme, generating multiple webcam karoake versions.
I'm not saying it pre-echoes FlyLo's own cyber-soul productions
with Erykah Badu on the new Until The Quiet Comes album,
but I can't help flashing on one serendipitous correspondence. In
his interview with Britt, FlyLo refers to the album as "a
children's record, a record for kids to dream to". Meanwhile, one
of the comments on that YouTube post states: "My mum used to sing
this to me as a Lullaby... and I'm planning to do the same for my
kids."

On the cover: Ashtray Navigations: Phil Todd’s slime-surfing DIY outfit have been reverberating for 21 years, a constant presence in Yorkshire’s ever-bubbling psych underground. By Alex Neilson. Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack and members of Movietone, Crescent and Third Eye Foundation tell Joseph Stannard the story of the West Country’s cosmic reverse. Frances Morgan takes a trip through Yorkshire Psychedelia. Plus: Mark Perry's Invisible Jukebox, Brooklyn rapper Ka, Ethiopian producer Mikael Seifu, artist Charlotte Prodger, confrontational music in Łódź, hundreds of albums, book and gigs reviewed, and much more. And don't forget our latest 20 track CD, free to all readers with The Wire.